Nothing
by Zerbinetta
Summary: The battle of Malachor V, the greatest massacre of the Mandalorian Wars. For him, however, it was the moment when the Force turned away from him, replaced by something more primal. He ceased to be who he once was, forgot his name... and became the Void.


I haven't written a Star Wars fic in a long, long time, and I was checking my author alert list and noticed just how many of the people on it were people who liked and wanted Star Wars stories. First of all, I apologize for not having written much SW since BHAH, but I simply had no inspiration when it came to the subject.

However, I am currently playing KotOR II again after a very long time and remembered this idea for a fic that I had had in mind for very long. It might be a one-shot… or I might continue with the other scenes you are only told about in KotOR, but never actually witness them. Scenes with the main character of this story, of course. You'll find out who it is soon enough, trust me. Anyway, I apologize again and hope that you don't hate me too much.

Enough said – read, review, and, above all, enjoy.

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**Nothing**

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Chaos.

Surrounding him, circling around him, penetrating him. He was lost. He was dead. There was no escape it. With no warning, it had begun, the grand finale of the final battle of the Mandalorian Wars. He still saw the final images in front of his eyes. Those he had fought alongside with dying, screaming, bleeding… the pain, mental and physical, he had felt, and the shrill, penetrating sounds within his head. He believed he would go mad if it continued.

There was no escape from it. Death was surrounding him and ready to close its final trap. This planet would be his grave, as it would be the grave of the Mandalorians, of the Jedi, all of them that had fallen into the grand trap Revan had so brilliantly constructed. But his mind didn't have the energy or the will to think about anything, let alone see the brilliance of this tactical move.

His lightsaber extinguished, he looked around and saw that the trap had closed in around him and that not even the Force, the all-powerful, all-knowing energy that was present everywhere, would rescue him from the planet. Doomed. The word never sounded truer. What had he done to deserve it? Nothing. He had simply followed an ideal and now, he was to be sacrificed, along with thousands of others, enemies or allies, for the sake of winning the war. A needed sacrifice. He had heard those words from the highest ranking among the Jedi who fought across the galaxy along with the Republic, as if it were something natural, something that must be accepted. The Jedi had been changed by the war and so had he.

Before today, he was willing to lay down his life for the noble cause of the Jedi that had risen against their Masters for the sake of the galaxy. But he had envisioned a death in battle, being struck down by an opponent, not this deathtrap that no one had told him of, the perfect trap and charade that was to end the series of massacres that had been the Mandalorian Wars. From the moment he saw that he was about to die and die for nothing, he wasn't a Jedi any longer, with his passive submission and a word of guidance always ready on his tongue.

He was simply himself, flesh and blood, mortal, vulnerable.

All he thought about was survival. As it is with all those who know that death is upon them, however, he remembered what his life had been like. He remembered the early years of his training among the Jedi, the teachings of the Force and the moment when he had realized that he was unable to agree with them when it came to the Mandalorian Wars and the Jedi involvement. Such crucial decisions he had made back then… the choice of coming here had been his own, but he, facing death, began to question it.

What cause would his death serve? Wiping out the entire Mandalorian race? They had not gone to war for bloodshed, but to protect the innocent citizens of the Republic! This was not what war had promised… what he had envisioned when he willingly defied all that he had been taught to respect for the sake of doing the right thing.

He would die, yes, and there was nothing to do about it… but the question remained, why?

Clumsily he searched for some form of shelter, protection, anything that would save him from what was to come. He ran across the field of stone of the strange world, almost blinded by his fear, ignoring all else besides the primal need to survive. He couldn't die like this! His senses screamed that at him. He had to escape, he had to leave at once! But he saw no means. Desperately, almost blindly, he clung to the idea that he would survive and escape the planet. Hopelessness at the moment would have driven him out of his mind.

And then, he saw it.

In front of him lay the wreckage of a ship, not as damaged as most of those that had fallen out of the sky in the last fateful hours, but still scarred badly by Mandalorian guns and with multiple hull breaches. But it was intact, he saw that most of the mechanisms were still working. He chose to rely on the only thing a Jedi is ever certain of – the Force.

He never considered himself some prodigious student, like those that led the Jedi efforts during this war. Power and skill and knowledge he had, but somehow, he had avoided the mistake of pride, at least more than most Jedi managed to do that. His will was unparalleled, however. When he looked back on that moment he spotted his possible salvation, he admitted to himself that only his will had kept him sane enough to make some sort of plan.

There was no "can do" or "cannot do", no doubts when he directed his entire willpower at the wreck. There was simply "must do". And his will gave him strength beyond anything he ever imagined. His will, projected through the Force, revived the dead ship, giving it new life and giving him new hope. With this newfound power, he struggled to haul the vessel from the gravity well as the world he was in collapsed around him. So strongly he was focusing on this goal that he didn't notice the Force changing around him.

The engines roared to life. He had accomplished the inhuman feat of resurrection, at least today. Regaining hope, he boarded the ship with haste. He would escape this place, there was hope… and after what he had managed to do, no more doubts clouded his thoughts. The ship was his and he held it together through his presence as it left the doomed planet behind and set off for the unknown. Only then, once he was far away from the place where the greatest horrors he had ever witnessed took place, did he resume feeling.

He collapsed on the bridge out of sheer exhaustion. All of his strength sapped, he was tired beyond recognition. But his hands, he saw, looked different. He touched his face and felt skin-covered flesh… and yet it was anything but that. He drew a shallow breath. Perhaps he hadn't emerged entirely the same from that hell. But outward appearances were of no concern to him. He knew that his robes were torn and dirty beyond recognition, but his life remained, and that was all that mattered to him.

As he began feeling again, the traditional Jedi senses returned to him and he spotted something he hadn't noticed before. The Force around him was… different. It was as if it was absent. He panicked, swaying over the edge of sanity for a moment. Had his weakness caused this? How come he felt the Force and yet he didn't, as if looking at a beautiful flower from behind a force cage? What had happened to him?

He curled into a ball on the floor, shivering slightly. Numerous wounds pained him, but he paid them no heed. It was the spiritual wound that concerned him most of all. Somehow, he felt different and he suspected that the physical change, whatever it was, was connected to this. Malachor V… he shuddered, but stopped at once as he felt another wave of pain. Something had happened there… to him.

The pain ignited no irritation, no anger, no fright that something might be wrong. He tried to feel the warmth of the fact that he had survived, but found that he couldn't. Something was weighting him down. Even as he attempted to be horrified by this realization, he found that the feeling of rage came only slowly, as if it was difficult for him to feel at all. Again he ran his hands over his body, over the shreds that had been his clothes hours before.

He tore the fabric from his skin, examining his body. His complexion had darkened, it bore innumerable scars and blood covered large parts of him. Most of it was his, but delirium refused to come. He could only understand that the Force didn't wish his death today.

The Force! It was so different now, but somehow, he couldn't remember what it had been like before. It was as if some crucial part of his memory had been taken away from him and wiped away. He didn't remember many things… but remembered new thoughts he didn't recognize. He tried hard to remember and found that even the simplest of information – his name – was carefully avoiding his grasp. Just as he felt he almost had it, it slipped out of his reach.

As did the Force.

Then, a strange feeling – but a feeling at last! – flashed like lightning through his body. Hunger. Insatiable hunger, incredible, torturous hunger. Yet it was not hunger for food as sentient beings and animals, as living things, felt it. He hungered for something that evaded his understanding, but it was a primal instinct. His will, beyond his control, was a tool of his hunger, and it directed his ship. He didn't know where he was going, but the hunger knew.

He wanted to scream out loud, but only a meaningless roar, much darker and more frightening than the voice he remembered as his own came from his mouth. The hunger was killing him from the inside, making him suffer more terribly than he ever did on Malachor. Had he escaped death only to be killed by an invisible thing that was inside him?

There was no Force to guide him, as he had been taught his whole life. He had nothing to rely upon, merely himself. If it was so, the small part of his mind that urged him to be calm figured out that he would need to make himself civilized again instead of a tortured, roaring beast. The hunger within him seemed to have sensed it as well and the Force, willingly or unwillingly, followed his subconscious command to dress him. The shreds of his former clothes were black a starless sky and, slowly, they repaired themselves into a long cloak that surrounded him and covered him.

He fell silent as he found himself dressed. And then he realized that the Force had obeyed him because he had commanded it – because he was stronger than the Force, because something within him tamed the Force for that brief moment to allow him some degree of dignity, despite his solitude. And the hunger within him had been soothed for a moment when the Force had been around him. The hunger and the Force had cancelled each other out. He no longer felt the Force around him.

What was he? How had he ended up as this?

He didn't know. He knew nothing… nothing except that he was alive and yet wasn't. That he was supreme to the living creatures of the universe. That his hunger wouldn't be calmed until there would be peace in the universe, peace as he saw it. Emptiness, as he was empty. Then, the hunger wouldn't torture him anymore, he hoped. Or it would, once it all was over. But he didn't care. He cared for nothing. Order and peace in the galaxy would be a simple byproduct of his true goal.

And he would bring them. What meaning and splendor was there in the creatures that were thoughtless, without belief or faith, without any kind of dreams or trust? Their lives flickered on other planets, worlds, like fireflies around a lamp? They were detached from their worlds, from their cultures. They were decadence itself, reckless and overly confident. They had created the wars, the chaos, the pain… he would end it. He would fulfill his final act of revenge and sustain his hunger until the end… and then, the end would come.

He no longer saw any kind of future in the galaxy, not with him in it.

Were there others like him, he wondered? He didn't believe so. His hunger was too absolute – surely no one else had the endurance he had. Surely no one else who had walked the surface of Malachor had lived to tell the tale. He was the black hole of the universe, the darkness in which all life would die.

Suddenly, his existence didn't seem so dreadful… until the hunger called again.

His name… his name… he had none. He didn't need one. He was simply he, he who was unique, who never rested, never was free, never would stop until his hunger would be appeased… and that would never be. He wasn't a Jedi or a Sith – the titles that divided and labeled the galaxy were beyond him. He was equally high above Force users as they were above ordinary people. He was the pinnacle of power and powerlessness in one, a slave to his hunger while his will and presence slowly enslaved others, wiping them of all things and ensuring that they were blindly obedient and sustained him while they could. Then… he moved to others.

He wasn't human, for he had no face – merely a mask that served to cover what he had once been, to grant him even more power to corrupt, enslave, dominate. He was the Void, the Darkness, the End. He was what he believed – and he believed in nothing anymore.

He was Nihilus.


End file.
